Cassondra Windwalker
Author Interview - Cassondra Windwalker
Author of The Gardener's Wife's Mistress
Hayden Hill has always felt most comfortable with his hands in dirt, nurturing life. He designs natural spaces for others and comes home to his back yard, where he seeks refuge amidst the fruits and vegetables, flora, and shade-giving trees. When he finds himself suddenly a widower, his garden becomes the resting place for the ashes of his wife, Shelly, and he’s thrown into an unexpected vortex of pain, shock, and guilt. As Hayden struggles to survive the torment of each day and keep his landscaping company functioning, a directive in Shelly’s will leads him to the discovery of a shocking secret.
Fighting to find a path through the weeds of grief, Hayden meets his wife’s secret connections and becomes involved helping local, homeless teens cast out by their families for choosing to be who they are. Rocked by this newly discovered, complicated facet of Shelly’s life, he begins to question their marriage, her identity, his past choices, and whether anything he believed about his wife was ever true.
Author Interview - Cassondra Windwalker
Author I draw inspiration from:
Three wildly different authors from whom I draw inspiration would be Ernest Hemingway, Madeleine L'Engle, and Lloyd Alexander. I don't try to mimic their style or their storytelling, but I hope to evoke in my readers the same sort of emotions they evoke in me. To create that deep wound time can't heal, that I go back and examine again and again and refuse to allow anyone to stitch up. To know my characters so intimately, and to allow my readers to know them so intimately, that a single eyebrow can convey a chapter's worth of exposition.
Author Interview - Cassondra Windwalker | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
In bed, of course! With lots of comfy pillows and a heating pad on my feet and the ghosts of every book I've ever read gathered around me. But I've been known to make do with a glass of wine by the river.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
In the interest of discretion, I'll just say that it wouldn't be fair to my husband to fully respond to this question. But J.R. Ward has a lot to answer for!
Author Interview - Cassondra Windwalker | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
That's a difficult question. I have no memory of the epiphany. I always was a writer, even before I'd mastered enough language to speak aloud. Which is to say, I paid attention to the world and told stories about it to myself. But an author...that's another thing entirely. I will say that my fourth-grade teacher Carol Hamilton had an enormous influence on the extent to which I believed such a thing was possible. She was an author herself, who encouraged me beyond all reason, and taught me that writing, like all arts, is a craft and vocation, not a feeling or a wish. That the books we write are not amorphous things "inside us," but real, tangible creations brought to life through dedication, will, and work.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
Oh, easy. I love the way a hardback sits on the shelf, how it holds its shape and keeps its promises, how it carries books through not just years but centuries. I love reading paperbacks in the pool and in the bath, I love breaking the spines and feeling the pages soften in my hands (yes, I'm a monster,) and I adore the smell of well-read books. I love how ebooks make it possible to read books from places in the world I will never see (and that's about it. I much prefer NOT to read on a screen if I can avoid it!) I love how audiobooks keep reading accessible for people whose physical or neurological conditions would otherwise make it difficult or impossible, but audiobooks put me to sleep. That's when my brain isn't chasing random rabbits of thought into squirrels' nests and getting distracted by passing crows and realizing I'm now three pages past the last place I was paying attention.
The last book I read:
Ocean, Earth's Last Wilderness, by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield. A glorious, sobering, exhilarating, heartbreaking read, that is ultimately a story of hope and empowerment - if we will only read it and believe it. Lately I've been reading a lot of science broken up by romance and thrillers. Balance.
Author Interview - Cassondra Windwalker | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
All of my prose is written on the computer, all my poetry by hand on paper. In any style or genre, writing has become an intensely physical, sensory experience for me, so I live in some terror of losing the use of my hands. I don't know if I could write without writing. I hope not to find out.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
You are getting perilously close to the favorite book question! How is it possible to pick just one, or ten, or a hundred? The best part of reading is losing oneself entirely in the text. It's like a dream. In every book, a friend, a lover, an enemy, someone lost, someone found, becomes our own, just as every night we live all these other lives. Readers are strange creatures. The human condition dictates that we avoid pain, but as readers, we seek it out. Knowing we shall suffer tiny griefs - and sometimes rather terrible griefs - at the end of every book, still we cannot read enough of them. We gather up ghosts and keep them in our pockets and consult imaginary people on our mundane conflicts. I have more best friends, more beloveds, than I can count. It is strange to me that we possess such incredible capacity for love that we lavish it on paper and ink and cannot spare a moment's compassion for the living, breathing people all around us. This is what makes reading and storytelling so fundamental to human progress. I do not believe a person can be an avid reader of fiction and remain unmoved by the suffering of others.
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
archaeologist. Kind of a cheat, obviously, because that's still a voracious reader and storyteller. But there's more playing in the dirt than with being an author. About an equitable number of curses, though, I think.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
Umm. I'm not much of a fashionista. I do love me some melodrama, but I also crave comfort. Something with long skirts and big hair. Glitter and glitz and a little goth. Am I describing the eighties or the Plantagenets? Who knows. I like my corsets purely decorative, though. Breathing is fun.
Place I’d most like to travel:
I want to go to Ireland. Not for just a few days, though. I want to truly be there. In the pubs, on the crossroads, in the creeks and the cathedrals and the castles. Standing on the shore and breathing in the country air. Walking the bloodstained streets and greeting all the stories and songs I've read all my life. Listening, most of all. Just listening.
My signature drink:
I love mixing fancy drinks of all sorts, so this one is almost (not quite) as tough as a favorite book question. But if you came to my house and were having a bad night, I'd mull some hot spiced apple cider for you, doctor it generously with dark rum, top it with whipped cream and drizzled caramel, tuck the blankets in around you, and listen to you talk.
Favorite artist:
Maybe this is a good time to say I kind of hate favorites. How much grief and misery in the world has been created by having favorites? I much prefer holding space for each in their own time. But I will endeavor to answer this question! A few great loves of mine, if not exactly favorites: Rainer Maria Rilke, Joshua Radin, Dylan Moran, Mary Stewart, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keefe, Sherman Alexie, Andy Runton, Tyler Childers. Also whoever created the cherry limeade.
Number one on my bucket list:
This is evolving all the time, because I try to mark things off as I go and not save them up for the end. But at the moment, I'd like to go see the redwood trees and explore the parks in northern California. Like the protagonist in my book, I possess a great fondness and affinity for trees and plant life in general (even though I am the bringer of death to houseplants.)
Anything else you'd like to add:
Please give The Gardener's Wife's Mistress a chance. I think it will surprise you. I believe everyone who reads it, regardless of their place in life, will find they love larger by the end.
Find more from the author:
IG: @cassondrawindwalker
FB: @CassondraWindwalkerWrites
Twitter: @WindwalkerWrite
About Cassondra Windwalker:
Cassondra Windwalker
Cassondra Windwalker earned a BA of Letters from the University of Oklahoma. Born and raised on the red clay, she’s wandered the sticky corn fields of the Midwest, the frozen seas of the Wild North, and frequently rests her wings where orange skies meet purple mountains. She’s the author of novels and poetry and does her best to keep fed a menagerie of stray critters, cryptids, marooned kelpies, and lost specters.
